My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

Shavit opens the chapter by telling the story of Herbert Bentwich, his great-grandfather. Bentwich arrives in Jaffa, a city in what is now Israel, on April 15, 1897, leading a Zionist expedition of 30 passengers from London. Most Zionists at this time are forced into Zionism by persecution in their Eastern European and Middle Eastern homelands, but Bentwich’s expedition is comprised of upper-middle-class British Jews. The Zionist leader Theodor Herzl organized the expedition to determine the prospects for colonizing Palestine. Neither Bentwich nor his Zionist contemporaries seek to conquer a country and establish a state. They desire only to be closer to God.

At the inception of the 20th century, there were approximately 11 million Jews globally: seven million in Eastern Europe, two million in Central and Western Europe, and 1.5 million in North America. Of those 11 million Jews, only about 3.5 million of them—those in North America and Western Europe—were emancipated. Russian and Eastern European Jews were discriminated against and forced into pogroms; Jews in Islamic countries were treated as second-class citizens. Even in Western countries, anti-Semitism was rising and would culminate in the Holocaust.

In the first half of the 20th century, a third of the global Jewish population was murdered. Jews in North America and Western Europe were losing their religion. Assimilated into society and no longer ghettoized, Jews secularized and emancipated themselves from religion. Both trends were threats to the continuing existence of the Jewish people. To Zionists at this time, it seemed obviously necessary for Jews to claim land in Palestine, to transform the Jewish people from a Diaspora to the people of a sovereign state. Their salvation depended on it.

Zionists believed this transformation could only occur in Palestine, the ancient Jewish homeland—their Holy Land. Only hours after arriving in Palestine, it is clear to Bentwich and his fellow expeditioners that “Judea is the place where the persecuted Jewish masses of Russia, Poland, and Romania should be settled” (11). However, they do not see the land in its entirety. They don’t see the Arab Palestinians already living on the land. They don’t see their villages, farms, markets, or buildings. They don’t see the more than 500,000 Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze who inhabit Palestine.

Shavit reasons that the land his great-grandfather observed was vast, including even today’s Kingdom of Jordan, was populated by fewer than one million people, and that Bentwich and his fellow expeditioners likely believed there was enough room for everyone—Jew and Arab. The land was populated by Bedouin nomads and serfs without property rights, living in humble dirt huts on the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire, plagued by poverty and disease. Shavit also criticizes his great-grandfather, an upper-class Victorian-era white man, as unable to see nonwhites as equal. Shavit concludes:

In April 1897 there is no Palestinian people. There is no real sense of Palestinian self-determination, and there is no Palestinian national movement to speak of. Arab nationalism is awakening at a distance […] it is quite understandable that one would see the land as a no-man’s-land. As a land the Jews may legitimately inherit (13).

Bentwich and his fellow expeditioners are motivated not to see the Arabs living on the land because if they see them, they must turn back to Europe, but they can’t turn back to Europe, so they choose not to see.

The Bentwich expedition is a colonial expedition, but the expeditioners don’t represent Britain or even Europe. The expedition is an attempt to save masses of persecuted Jews. It doesn’t represent an empire; it represents desperate people seeking a home before they cease to exist. They do not want to oppress, exploit, or conquer; they want to liberate, invest, and survive. Beginning in 1913, the Bentwich family begins emigrating from Britain to Palestine. 

In the 1920s there were three Palestinian villages and two Palestinian hamlets in the approximately 7,500-acre Harod Valley. The valley was owned by the Sarsouk family of Alexandria, and the local inhabitants were their serfs. Following the 1903 Easter pogrom in Moldova, a surge of Jews migrated to Palestine to find salvation and practice human and environmentally friendly socialism. Shavit describes them as a new breed of Jew: young, ambitious, brilliant, and brave. In 1909 they established the small Degania commune, but it failed. In 1920, when they tried again to create a commune, they built a large, rigid, Bolshevik-style commune and attempted to wrest Sarsouk land with a tough and determined semi-military Labor Brigade.

After providing this historical context, Shavit shifts to the present tense, telling the story as if both he and the reader were there in the Valley. On September 21, 1921, the convoy enters the Valley of Harod and occupies the land in an attempt to lay claim to it. The small, well-organized, disciplined socialist organization outmaneuvers 600,000 Arabs to gain control of the valley. They build a kibbutz, a large communist colony. Thus begins Israel’s socialist future. The Labor Brigade ethos of kibbutz socialism provides the cohesion, mental determination, and moral imperative required to accomplish a Zionist revolution of this magnitude.

The encampment grows from a small area to consume the entire valley. The conquest is driven by utopian ideals and desperation. Every Ein Harod kibbutz member is a young orphan who has lost their homeland and is now forced to construct another. Ein Harod transforms the orphans from desperate wanderers to energetic conquerors with no boundaries, restraint, comfort, or mercy. These young men and women are the only hope for the survival of the Jewish people, so there is no conception of individual rights, needs, or wants in the kibbutz—only the task at hand. Soon, they plow the fields, till the earth, and sow the seeds as they “return to history and regain their masculinity” and “transform themselves from object to subject, from passive to active, from victims to sovereigns” (35). Within months they farm 475 acres of land previously barren, blast a mountain quarry, and succeed at raising milk cows and egg-laying hens.

As the kibbutz population grows it becomes self-sustaining. In the spring they use advanced technology and tremendous efforts of labor to drain the valley of its marshes, eliminating the deadly scourge of malaria and transforming the wasteland into arable land. This improvement is a benefit to both their encampment and their Arab neighbors. The Valley of Harod had been desolate for centuries. Now, because of Zionist planning, ingenuity, and labor, it is fertile. On the first anniversary of the now world-famous Ein Harod kibbutz, its population has doubled, and it has over 2,000 acres of cultivated land on which the young orphans produce grain, olives, grapes, and vegetables, while maintaining a 150-acre forest.

This prosperity will not last. The Arabs forcibly removed from the valley will not forget. In three years, Arab gunfire will besiege the encampment. In nine years, Jews will force Arab villagers to leave. In 10 years, Arabs will set the valley’s fields ablaze. In 12 years, the kibbutz will form the first elite Anglo-Jewish military unit, which will raid Arab villages, murder civilians, and lay the groundwork for Israel’s future army. In 22 years, this military will attack the remaining Arab villages and expel all Palestinians from the valley. Eventually, the Ein Harod kibbutz collapses.

Palestine is one of the world’s foremost orange-growing regions. In the 1850s Palestinians discovered the Shamouti orange growing in Jaffa. By the turn of the century, Palestinians were shipping large quantities of the Shamouti oranges, now called Jaffa oranges, globally. In 1925 Palestine had 7,500 acres of citrus groves; in 1927 they had doubled; in 1929 they had 21,750 acres; and by 1935 Palestine had 70,000 acres of citrus groves and exported a third of Great Britain’s oranges.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Rehovot Jewish grove owners grow oranges alongside their Arab neighbors. By now, Zionists live a comfortable middle-class life. Jews comprise more than a quarter of the Palestinian population, and their numbers grow by more than 10% annually. Zionist injustices to their Arab neighbors are still limited. Many tenant Palestinian farmers had been removed from their land, but they had no right of possession of the land under their Arab masters, and many of their lives improved as the field hands of Jewish colonizers. Jews and Arabs live a peaceful coexistence, living and working side-by-side and growing oranges together. Shavit elaborates, “the Zionists of Rehovot can still believe that the clash between the two peoples is avoidable. They cannot yet anticipate the imminent, inevitable tragedy” (53).

In 1935, as Nazi Germany enforces racist Nuremberg laws, Jews in Palestine lead blissful lives. Zionism has matured into an orderly, civilized, democratic, and powerful political body. Every year improves on the prior. Jews and Arabs together create a prosperous economy, but an underground Arab movement is growing. Izz Abd al-Kader Mustafa Yusuf ad-Din al-Kassam is an Arab-Palestinian nationalist who led a national-religious revolt against French rule in Syria. In 1925 he began forming clandestine revolutionary cells, compiling arms and money, killing Jews, and waging armed Jihadist struggle against Zionists in Palestine. In 1935 he launches a failed midnight raid in which he is killed, but his martyrdom becomes the catalyst for a larger Arab revolt against Jewish Zionist Palestinians.

In 1935 Palestinian Jews and Arabs maintain a peaceful coexistence. Shavit says:

What the Jews have already accomplished in the local groves has proved that there is no limit to the amount of orange gold that can be produced in this land. There is no limit to the land’s bounty. And there is no limit to the ability of Palestine to absorb and save the Jews (67).

This success proves to Zionists that they were right to end their wandering and return to their Holy Land. Tumult and violence lie ahead and will put into question the voracity of such assertions.